![]() While Taylor's characters can be openly cruel to their friends or partners, their unwillingness to be emotionally transparent is not so different from the decorous, convoluted behavior of Gilded Age protagonists. In this sense perhaps Taylor implies that the modern university experience has failed us, for we have not succeeded in transcending our ideological, social, and economic barriers, even in an open setting for experimental learning. To pay for university expenses, Ivan decides to produce "arty" porn clips with stylized, hypnotic body movements for mass consumption - thus consciously exploiting the capitalist machine for what he sees as the greater good.Īrguably, many of Taylor's "late Americans" represent the modern counterparts of characters that populate the novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser - those who are shaped by their histories or confined by strict yet undefined social regulations. After an injury derailed his promising dance career, Ivan shifts his studies to finance as a way to secure his own, and his elderly parents', material stability. The most aesthetically sensitive, yet also most pragmatic character, is probably Ivan, a talented ex-dancer who sees art simply as a means to an end. Fatima, a poor barista and struggling dancer, while embracing environmental causes, cannot afford the steep cost of locally sourced food. Fyodor's lover can denounce his meatpacking job while blithely espousing capital punishment. ![]() Regardless, it appears that the cost of facile piety or "aesthetic anger" is mostly borne by the socially disadvantaged - be they laborers or artists. ![]() Fyodor, the meatpacking worker, while an intuitive artist - since he perceives the formal beauty between a well-trimmed cut of meat and that of a modernist painting's abstract elements - is constantly derided by his vegetarian lover for his "murderous" profession and his lack of appreciation for the theoretical aspects of art. Seamus' disdain for his peers' lack of aesthetic rigor masks his insecurity and corroding shame that contribute to his writer's block. Seamus, who works as a cook at a local hospice to finance his MFA in poetry, is undone by the hatred and violence inflicted upon him by a gay "townie" during a casual sexual encounter. At the same time, there seems to be little convergence or understanding between the town residents and the students, or among the students themselves. In a way, Iowa City is a contradiction - as a college town surrounded by barren, windswept landscape and hilly terrains, it is both coarse and rarefied, peopled by meatpacking plant workers, laborers, artists, writers, forming a racially diverse and sexually fluid population. Physical intimacy offers the characters temporary respite if not intellectual or ideological solidarity. While the harsh, wintry Midwestern setting - with its slate-colored sky, dirty, slushy snow in the winter, diseased ash trees - seems more Gothic than Romantic, this barren framing intensifies the characters' corporeal desires, manifest via their sweaty bodies in overheated, indoor space. Taylor's setting of the open Iowa landscape both references and poetically subverts the campus novel's pastoral elements - those that mimic the lush milieu of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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